Injuries getting Dodgers’ attention

Precautions were taken. The players were strengthened, stretched and conditioned. What the pitchers did between their starts was closely monitored.

But 51 games away from the regular-season’s finish line, the Dodgers are limping and falling in the standings, passed in the last week by the Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres. Tonight they will enter a three-game series in Cincinnati on the verge of losing five consecutive games for the first time this season.

Jason Schmidt and Yhency Brazoban are done for the season. Randy Wolf and Hong-Chih Kuo could be too.

Brad Penny and Derek Lowe, the inning-eating anchors of the rotation, are experiencing problems with muscles. Jeff Kent hasn’t played in more than a week because of a strained hamstring.

“The number of players that have been hurt this year is not an acceptable number by any stretch of the imagination,” trainer Stan Conte said. “We put [Manager Grady Little] in a terrible position in regards to the starting rotation and the bullpen.”

The timing has been particularly brutal.

From May 23 to July 15, the Dodgers put seven players on the disabled list. Only three players were moved onto the DL in the same window last season.

“This is only my second year here, but even in the minor leagues and when I was playing, it seems like when there’s a rash of injuries, it all comes at one time,” pitching coach Rick Honeycutt said. “It just snowballs.”

But the cause is unknown.

“I don’t see anything that we could’ve done differently,” Little said. “Some things just happen.”

Honeycutt said that if starting pitchers were logging a lot of innings, he made certain to reduce their workload in their side sessions between starts. He said that Lowe “almost backed off completely” at one point.

Honeycutt added that the number of times relievers warmed up was tracked.

The issue could be the history of the personnel.

Kuo and Brazoban are no strangers to arm trouble. Wolf hadn’t pitched many innings over the last two seasons because of injuries. Schmidt has thrown almost 2,000 innings in 12 major league seasons.

The explanations don’t satisfy Conte or Doug Jarrow, the strength and conditioning coach.

“I think it’s going to take some time for us as a medical staff to sit down and look at each one of these injuries as we go along and see if we could’ve done anything to prevent them,” Conte said. “It’s the responsibility of our medical department and me to find out why and try to fix that so it doesn’t keep happening. That requires looking at each individual one, looking at the research, looking at what we have done, looking at what we could do better, looking at what we could take away.”

Jarrow said he and other strength and conditioning coaches from around the league would discuss in the off-season why injuries are up in the majors this year.

Conte says one of the keys to preventing injuries is improving communication with players.

“A player doesn’t always say it in a way you can understand it all the time, but it’s part of our job to figure out what he’s saying,” he said. “A lot of times they know exactly what they mean, but they can’t verbalize it very well or they don’t know exactly what it is and they have an idea.”

--

dylan.hernandez@latimes.com